Philly Style Represents The Best Of America At World Baseball Classic

MIAMI, FL — Philly baseball was on the world stage in Miami Tuesday night, when the man known as the Greatest Showman launched a 432-foot moonshot beyond the veil in right center field. Bryce Harper, responsible for two of Team USA's three hits in the World Baseball Classic final, had done it again when the lights were brightest, in his nation's hour of need, in the bottom of the eight inning.

And Philly baseball remained on display some twenty five minutes later when Team Venezuela clinched their stunning 3-2 upset over the favored Americans.

While the Venezuelans sobbed with joy and disbelief on the raucous infield grass, Harper moved slowly among them, shaking hands with and hugging every single player on the opposing squad that had just defeated him.

At the conclusion of a tournament that had seen the Americans excoriated for everything from poor sportsmanship to lack of style, amidst ongoing instability between the governments of the two nations represented on the field, with the fraught experiences of Venezuelans in the United States over the past 15 months as palpable on the diamond as the deeply divided dominion outside the park, in the modern age of data center-delivered discontent, it was a moment exceedingly rare.

It was humanity. And brotherhood.

It was apolitical.

"In the grey dingle of modern existence, restless with barren toil, you suddenly appeared like the shining messenger of vanished ages," Pierre de Coubertin, considered the father of the modern Olympic games, wrote in his 1912 poem 'Ode to Sport,' "Those ages when humanity could smile."

How simple for the cynical and the tribal to dismiss such notions. How simple, especially when athletics is viewed through the lens of its baubles and gonfalons alone, from the shadowy square of a sports betting app, from the myopic maths of a financier's spreadsheet.

The camera roved on Harper for just a few moments. Unwitting Frankensteins, Fox and Major League Baseball hardly seem to understand what they've made with the World Baseball Classic, a championship tournament that's actually affordable to attend. Crowds of every social class that bleed baseball packed stadiums from Miami to Tokyo to San Juan for fourteen days of competition unlike anything the professional leagues offer.

There is a reason that players say the WBC has a better atmosphere than the World Series. Why even analysts are comparing it to the World Cup. Why events like the Super Bowl are being called corporate curiosities in comparison.

The Venezuela victory was not a victory for the government of deposed dictator Nicolas Maduro. It was not a victory for the billionaire owner of a major league franchise. It was a victory for the thousands of children across the tropical nation, from the streets of Caracas to the alpine páramo, who grow up playing stickball and wallball, who play act such moments in games their entire lives. It was a victory for old men sitting over tiny antenna televisions in dark alleyways who have always known their baseball heritage could stand up to any place on earth.

Not without reason did tears well in the eyes of Venezuelan closer Daniel Valencia before he even threw the final strike.

"I think the world saw baseball's a great game," Harper later told a gaggle of media microphones back in the bowels of the stadium. "It's a lot of fun to watch the cultures from every other country, and ours as well."

The words could not mean more from anyone else on Team USA than Harper, who launched his bat high into the air in celebration after his homer, who ran his hand across the American flag on his jersey as he rounded third. No one is more gracious in loss than the one who happens to be the most ferocious in victory.

It stands in stark contrast to the face the Americans had put to the world through most of the tournament, including catcher Cal Raleigh repeatedly refusing to shake the hand of his Seattle Mariners teammate Randy Arozerena, of Team Mexico, because he said he had to "lock in." Raleigh proceeded go 0 for 9 with five strikeouts in the WBC.

And since Harper has become the face of Philadelphia sports over the past eight years, the best of America was, as it has been before, the best of Philadelphia.